So what do sheep dream of?

Posts Tagged ‘track’

I spread the water treatment plant design plans out over the cluttered table, tracing the pipelines with my fingers. An overhead photo of the city took up an entire wall of the room. I laid the plans over the location the plant would be built. The scale matched up perfectly.

“So do you want to go look at it?,” asked my boss.

I began doing up the laces on my steel-toed boots, but it wasn’t to go out to the job site to see the construction. I was going to try and bail work early and go home.

“Come on, it will be fun,” he said. “I’ll show you how to get there.”

I shrugged. Might as well, I had nothing better to do.

He began to trace out walking directions on the wall map. A thick navy blue line appeared where his fingers touched the wall.

“You’ll have to come out on this curved street. Then the road branches and you can either go over the bridge or you’ll have to cross the running track.”

I chose to cross the running track. It was state of the art, a beautiful polished hardwood track running across streets and through buildings. I came upon it as it went through a large gymnasium. The runners’ feet gently pounded the wood in a rhythmic thump. Alongside the track stood a series of observation platforms hovering a few feet above the floor. From there I could stand and watch the runners. Each platform was mounted on a twisting series of hydraulic pistons and hoses.

I stood on a platform and relished in the amazing feel of it. Each footfall of every runner resonated up through the platform. I could feel their feet pounding the wood; how their heels touched first and the pressure passed on to the balls of their feet.

I left the platforms and continued on my journey. Paralleling the track ran a soft, padded rail upon which I walked, arms spread out for balance. A group of high school students was on a tour of the facility. I decided to join them. The tour led to a small tunnel we had to enter. The opening was three feet square, the tunnel itself lined in padded emerald green mats. We entered crawling on our hands and knees. The tunnel took several sharp turns, working its way around and down. A young couple was crawling in front of me. They were too slow, so I passed them, squeezing by in the next turn.

There was a man in the tunnel. He had a gun. He kidnapped the young couple and me, took us to a house. He stuck us in the living room. The young girl left for an adjoining bedroom as the kidnapper went outside through a sliding glass door, to his truck to make his getaway. Sirens sounded in the distance.

With an angry glare, the kidnapper got out of the truck and came back in the house through the sliding glass door. He now had two semi-automatic pistols.

“Who called the cops?!”

I held my hands up, pleaded with him. “It wasn’t me! Look, how could I have called the cops while eating both these yogurts?”

To emphasize my point I took the two spoons I had been eating yogurt with, grabbed the ends opposite the handles, and firmly squeezed the spoonfuls of cold strawberry yogurt between my thumbs.

“It must have been her. She called the cops.” I pointed to the bedroom.

With a savage snarl he walked over to the wall separating the bedroom and the room we were in. She was hiding in the closet on the other side. He raised a gun at the wall, aiming for where she would have been. With a sudden smile he mimed firing the gun.

“Pchoo”

Approaching the wall he shoved aside a portion of it. She screamed in terror as he took her.